At Home, Arlington, Massachusetts
 
I think pregnancy is going to be horrible for me. Or at least, technically, I think that the postpartum period is going to be hell. I pretty much expect that I will deal with postpartum depression. This is my very unscientific evaluation, but being on the pill was great for me. It regulated my moods and everything seemed to just balance out. The ups and downs of my emotional life were significantly less exaggerated. Now that I'm coming off the pill, everything is hitting me again full force. It's like I had forgotten just how unruly my emotional life was and know I'm meeting a familiar face once again. It makes me think that pregnancy itself will be pretty great - I'll be on a high. But if the loss of hormones I'm going through now is any foretaste of the loss of hormones I'll go through then, well then look out world. Hannah's life is going to SUCK.

At Home, Arlington, Massachusetts
 
Coming off of the pill is fucking horrible.
 
Needless to say, today was not good. It literally feels like every hormonal onslaught I've avoided for the last four years is crashing in upon me. I knew that being on the pill was regulating my hormones – it was apparent from the get go that I was one of the women whose hormones were regulated on the pill rather than sent whacko. But now it means everything is going ape shit on me. I haven’t felt this type of weepy apathy in years. It feels like everything inside of me was first ratcheted up to 1,000 and then abruptly turned off.
 
First I was angry and stressed for most of the day. Literally everything went wrong with registration for my summer directed study course that could go wrong. Forms hadn't been turned in correctly, administrators didn't reply to emails with information, and other administrators would only tell me what I needed to know after I sent them multiple emails and left two voice messages. Then when it finally got figured out, I just turned into a big ball of tears and I've been crying for the last two hours. I forgot what it feels like to want to hide from yourself.
 
That's the worst of it. That's the worst part of PMS – the almost maddening desire to get away from yourself, to escape from yourself. The feeling that somewhere, outside of yourself, you know that it's ok. But for now, you are your own worst prison. A ball of furry, shame, or sorrow, interchangeably surrounding your best held dreams and decimating them before your eyes. And what's worse – you know you will not stay your enemy. You know that once that release comes, all will be right. But nothing, nothing you do in the moment can bring that physical, animal sense of release. Only blood will do so. Just hold on to then and then the chemical balance will come, and you will know when it does come. Until then, only Jesus.

At Home, Arlington, Massachusetts
 
Today is a big day for Nation family reproductive history. This is my first day off of the pill.
 
I've been trying to write about the end of using the pill for a few days now, but I just haven't been able to do so until now. It honestly just didn't really register until last night when I went to set my alarm for this morning. I didn't set my 9:00am alarm for the pill and though I haven't set it for a week every month for the last four years, this was what caused the reality to really hit home. I don't intend to really ever set that alarm again. An era of my reproductive life has concluded.
 
Birth control is a funny thing and I've been thinking about it a lot recently. I am deeply thankful for its invention and thankful that I live in a time and age in which I have the option of easily separating sex from procreation for a time. Granted, it does mean that I have been constantly tempted to view those things as fundamentally separated and fundamentally in my control, but I also have had the opportunity to learn the lesson of surrendering my will to God. I get to choose to step into a new role, following the Lord as I do so.
 
This thing – motherhood – is not my own story. I belong to the bigger story of Eve – the story which involves helping and suffering, adoption and heirs, waiting and promises, the Bride and childbirth. I don't get to choose whether I face a reckoning with this story. I live in a time and place in which the world is constantly trying to trick me into thinking that I can escape this story if I want to, that I can wrest this story into being my own, and mine alone. But all women everywhere will stand face to face with their potential, abandoned, lost, or gained motherhood at some point and decide how to engage this story that has always been bigger than our small individual selves.
 
Lord, I am small and I am usually pretty afraid of this story that you have spun into motion. And most days I think that by expelling a baby from my womb, I will inevitably expel my brains along with it. But I am trying, really trying to believe that the story you created is not a harmful story for my person. That you did not make me second rate. That by being a mother, I will not be losing everything you have created me to be. That you have created me to be a self and a mother, and that I do not need to be a mother to be a self. And ultimately, that motherhood was not intended to be a destructive force that shuts down a woman's gifts, talents, and strengths, but rather something that can be wondrous.

(Image by Erik Cleves Kristensen, "Mother painting.")